... french press! But it IS messy and more work. It takes some time to gauge how long you want to let the coffee and water live together. I read somewhere, never more then 10 minutes...

Good points about the French press. The problem I had with the original French press design, the glass one, is that the coffee gets cold while brewing. I used to wrap it up in a kitchen towel, until I found a stainless-steel, double-wall insulated pot. Like this one.

Agreed... that's why I paid only a half (whatever the promotion was at the time). Still expensive, though. There were times when I could afford it... not anymore.

Affording is relative, not only to bank balance but also to mindset.

There are days when I can afford something, only discover the very next day - especially if I have actually been moved to making the purchase - that I can't afford it. And nothing fiscal has changed overnight at all!

Anyway, I am now convinced that coffee is best left undrunk. As you may know, I am slowly converting cassettes to mp3 files, and also varnishing a repaired shutter the while, and confusion is creeping into my programme. Simple as the conversion turned out to be (once I'd realised the Help line was bullshit and I'd tempted Fate and gone my own way with the system), I have now twice recorded approximately an hour's worth of sound only to discover that when closing down another tab (possible during a part of the process to have an additional one open), I have become so spaced out with the heady mix of turps, varnish and coffee that I switch the whole goddam thing off and have to start again. So far, 40 tapes have been put to bed and I face a dozen or two more.

Always use a china teapot, warmed up first with a rinse with boiling water from the kettle used to make the tea. This is essential for the production of a civilized cup of tea. Using anything other than a felt or knitted tea cosy is out, both aesthetically and thermodynamically. If you no longer have a granny who could make one for you, I suppose you could do worse than visit a second-hand shop - not for a granny, for a cosy - but be sure to have the cosy professionally cleaned before use. (Likewise if the granny proves irresistible to you.)

I’m not sure Orwell has it right, though: not only is sugar a distraction, if not a destructor of the taste of tea as he rightly claims, but he goes on to make an even bigger pig’s ass of it by using milk!

Dairy products and tea don’t mix very happily. Milk can work wonders with some coffees in the right proportions, but all tea that I have ever tasted (and I did spend a few weeks on a tea plantation in the Nilgiris during my early youth) comes off better straight – much as whisky is supposed to do, though I did like that better on the rocks or with Crabbie’s as in Whisky Mac. (Unfortunately, such delights are now as much in the realm of the impossible as is a bottle of plonk; medical rationing, I’m afraid.) Never mind milk: the wrong sort of water can screw it up: try using chlorinated water which is sometimes all folks can get: it makes tea taste like a bathroom cleaner. Not that I have indulged, of course, but you get the picture.

Even the friggin’ coffee is meant to be restricted to a single, daily cup, but I tend to play fast and loose with that, claiming that I comply with the postprandial walking requirements each day and, in that manner, burn it off along with much of everything else that enters my system. Sounds convincing to me. As it was advice offered on leaving hospital, I suppose it was meant for the immediate future, and that advice dates from some years ago now and nobody has mentioned it since… you see the power of positive thinking?